And see the beautiful illustrations by Eva!

Why do rituals persist? They are often treated either as attempts to influence uncertain outcomes or as practices that regulate group life. But these functions are usually blended together. In our new paper, we argue that reinforcement learning helps explain this blending.

The Cultural Evolution Society is delighted to announce that Feryl Badiani (She/Her), LEVYNA, Masaryk University, is the recipient of the 2026 CES Richerson Award for Outstanding Doctoral Research. Please join us in congratulating Feryl on this well-deserved recognition!

Do supernatural punishment beliefs promote cooperation beyond parochial boundaries? And is this effect stronger in "moralistic" religious traditions (eg Christianity, Hinduism)? Working with some of best & brightest in our field, that's what our new prereg aims to answer: github.com/bgpurzycki/G...

New paper— everyone is collecting intensive longitudinal data but recent review studies report that less than half of studies consider measurement/psychometrics. The paper covers a few foundational psychometric methods for ILD and provides a shiny app to apply them link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Can distant conflict increase religiosity? Led by R. Chvaja, we found that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was associated with increased religious engagement in nearby countries, but in different groups: mainly among the religious in Czechia, and among the non-religious in Poland. shorturl.at/euxSh

New paper: costly signals are not reliable simply because they are costly. Intuition may help stabilize high-cost signaling, but signal reliability seems to depend on the interaction between intuition and context-sensitive deliberation. www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

🚨🚨🚨 International Society for Moral Psychology (ISMP) 🚨🚨🚨 ISMP was formed to create an interdisciplinary and international home for moral psychology, aimed at fostering deeper engagement across traditions, methodologies, and cultural contexts. internationalsocietymoralpsychology.com/join-ismp/

As the conference gets closer, here’s how to get to Brno for IACESR 2026 ✈️ Fly direct (limited routes) or travel via nearby hubs: Vienna (~2h) • Prague (~2.5–3h) • Bratislava (~1.5–2h) 📅 1–3 July 2026 More info: iacesr.com/conferences/ #IACESR2026 #TravelInfo

How does religious conflict reshape moral cognition across cultures? We're hiring a postdoc to help answer that question using computational modeling (DDM, RL) across 20 countries. www.phil.muni.cz/en/careers/a... #Postdoc #CognitiveScience #ComputationalModeling #MoralPsychology

People re-use each other's words, syntax and semantics in conversation, arguably to facilitate common ground. In a new Proceedings of the Royal Society B we assess whether this tendency can be used an individually reliable trait (e.g. to correlate it to something else): doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 1/

IACESR 2026 – 10th Biennial Meeting We’re excited to announce our keynote speakers: Will Gervais • Rebekah Richert • Quentin Atkinson • Larisa Heiphetz Solomon 📍 Brno, Czech Republic 📅 1–3 July 2026 | Masaryk University Registration open soon. Stay tuned. #IACESR2026 #CognitiveScienceOfReligion

Happy Valentine’s Day, from us to you. Tag your exes. Xoxox

A new article in Nature Medicine found that social connections were a surprisingly powerful predictor of a long life. Living with a partner was roughly as beneficial as exercise. www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/debunking-...

📢 New Paper 🚨 Hadza food-sharing is egalitarian, yet offers in giving games have never matched the equitable redistribution seen in real life. In this study, we allowed people to give *or* take. Lifelike equitable distributions only appeared when people took from peers in surplus. bit.ly/4kvLOwA

Thrilled to share our latest paper, out now in Science Advances! We explored the development of cooperative behaviors — fairness, trustworthiness, forgiveness, & honesty —  across five societies, culturally contextualizing them & seeing how they correlate. (1/5) www.science.org/doi/full/10....

This is who runs this account

Evidence for a “Breaking Bad” effect of a cancer diagnosis—>

New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....

New paper - we try to test a classic secularization theory w/ longitudinal data: is material security in early adolescence associated with later decrease in belief in God in young adulthood? tl;dr: it is, a little bit.. w/ @lnpx1thetadelta.bsky.social & R.Chvaja www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

We’re organizing IACESR 2026 in Brno (July 1–3) — CFP closes Feb 6. If you work on cognitive or evolutionary approaches to religion, we’d be very happy to welcome you in Brno :)

After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data. If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition. eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...

Why do people endorse seemingly extraordinary beliefs such as in pseudoscience & supernatural entities? Leading approaches stress cognitive biases (like agency detection) & social dynamics (like signaling). Eli Stark-Elster & I argue that experience matters too & put fwd a framework explaining how.

1/ 🧵 New PNAS paper by CCE’s @michealdebarra.bsky.social @aiyanakoka.bsky.social with Angel V Jiménez and Nachita Rosun🎉 📄 Why do people turn to religious or supernatural cures? 🧪🏺 #evolpsy #evolanth #evolutionarybehaviouralsciences #culturalevolution

Fully funded #PhDposition in Comparative Cultural Psychology @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social. We will use touchscreen experiments & eyetracking to study mental simulations in nonhuman apes & human children across different cultures. All info here: www.eva.mpg.de/career/posit... Please share / apply!🙏

A great opportunity for ECRs studying ritual!

New pre-print analyzing 25,000 Christian sermon transcripts across the USA. Churches account for most systematic variance in sermon content, geographic region accounts for none. We identify niches in sermon content that may guide religious competition in USA. osf.io/preprints/ps...

In our new paper, we show why religious signals can serve as reliable markers of commitment: insiders perceive both cooperative and supernatural benefits in participation, but outsiders—who don’t share those supernatural expectations—see no comparable gains, making the signal not worhtwile

If you're a data scientist interested in a full-time or part-time role working with developmental psychologists on cross-cultural data from parents and children, check out this position with the Developing Belief Network. Application review begins October 15, 2025. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

We're looking for participants for a 10-15 minute survey asking about your favourite fiction genre, interests, worries & coping styles. brookeshls.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... We're trying to better understand how engagement with fiction relates to how you engage with the world - let us know!

PsyArXiv is now down to only ~40% of the backlog we started with, thanks to our amazing moderators 🎉 To all mods: thank you so much for your hard work! Did one of your preprints get approved recently? Help us show our thanks by liking and sharing this post :) #PsyArXiv #PsychSciSky

Book symposium for Jesper Sørensen’s *Why Cultures Persist* posted online at Religion, Brain and Behavior. With commentaries from, among others, RCC’s Anders Klostergaard Petersen and @bgpurzycki.bsky.social. www.tandfonline.com/action/showA...

Now out in JPSP! Behavioral economic experiments w/ Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and Jews in the U.S., Israel and Fiji show that belief in God can facilitate cooperation, even across religious divides! More about our work (co-led with @jeremyginges.bsky.social) below! psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

PCI Psychology is open for submissions! Did you know that you can easily submit your recommended preprint to 20+ PCI Psych friendly journals? See all friendly journals here: psych.peercommunityin.org/about/pci_fr... #PsychSciSky #SciPub

How can we reform science? I have some ideas. But I am not sure you’ll like them, because they don’t promise much. elevanth.org/blog/2025/07...

New 2 year post-doc position on cultural adaptation in complex environmental management.

HBES is happy to recognize the following Rising Stars (<8 years post-PhD) for their research contributions: Mohammad Atari: mohammadatari.com Catherine Molho: catherinemolho.github.io Daniel Redhead: www.rug.nl/staff/d.j.re... Julia Stern: www.uni-bremen.de/en/pppd/team...

Free online for the next two weeks: @bgpurzycki.bsky.social‘s *Morality and the Gods*. www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Folks, it's time to submit your papers to PCI Psychology. Here is our invitation to you, taken from our editorial osf.io/preprints/ps...

These are great ideas for all PIs.

Who needs fancy R packages for graphs, when you can plot them in the sand? Many thanks to @martinlangcz.bsky.social for teaching today's class at our field school in Mauritius

This highlights the point that comparisons between humans and machines are continually muddied by a lack of distinction between evolution and development, both of which contribute to learning in the broad sense.

Post-doc opportunities in religious cognition don't come up too often these days, but here's a good one in the Czech Republic with @martinlangcz.bsky.social www.muni.cz/en/about-us/...

Global scientists that apply for an ERC to relocated to the EU+UK can now apply for 2m + the ERC (which is 1.5, 2, or 2.5) + startup for large facilities (another potential 0.5). Chance of getting it isnt astronomical but with a resume and plan worth a try! Good time to spend a ~decade in the EU?

Can religious beliefs shape peoples' attitudes and behaviours regarding climate change? We explored this using data from a large-scale UK cohort study (ALSPAC) In short: Perhaps, but it's complicated. Answer depends on generation, religiosity measure and climate question doi.org/10.1371/jour...

And: I'm hiring a post-doc! I'm looking for someone with a strong computational background who can start in the summer (or sooner). Details here: apply.interfolio.com/165122 Feel free to reach out with questions (email is best: [email protected]) and please share widely!

🚨Job alert! Two-year postdoc to join the Rep2SI project at @lsemethodology.bsky.social! We're looking for a modeller to join our team of ethnographers & experimentalists studying the role of reputation and reputational concern in perpetuating social inequality. Apply by 4 May: tinyurl.com/yjccd3vv

If you want to understand why we do the things we do, being trained in cross-cultural and evolutionary perspectives is a pretty good start 😊 excellent thread from CCE's @abbeyepage.bsky.social on our MSc in Psychology, Culture & Evolution, now accepting applications 👇

🚨 Now accepting commentary proposals!! 🚨Thrilled to share that our paper --- "Resource-rational contractualism: A triple theory of moral cognition" --- was accepted for publication at Behavioral and Brain Sciences and is open for commentary!